Mark Twain: A Biography. Complete

by Albert Bigelow Paine

“Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?”

So he remembered that first, long-ago meeting. It was a conspicuous performance. The crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men.

Following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of welcome at Haverly's Theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and cheers and oratory swept about him. Clemens, writing of it that evening to Mrs. Clemens, said:

I never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before.
Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, and so on.
What an iron man Grant is! He sat facing the house, with his right
leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an
angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair.
You note that position? Well, when glowing references were made to
other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle
of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently
the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent.
But Grant! He was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of
praise and congratulation; but as true as I'm sitting here he never
moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty
minutes! You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy.
Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a
particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the
audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an
entire minute—Grant sitting as serene as ever-when General Sherman
stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder,
bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear. Then Grant got up
and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane.

But it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax. This was at the grand banquet at the Palmer House, where six hundred guests sat down to dinner and Grant himself spoke, and Logan and Hurlbut, and Vilas and Woodford and Pope, fifteen in all, including Robert G. Ingersoll and Mark Twain. Chicago has never known a greater event than that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there.

To Howells Clemens wrote:

Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag
reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers,
most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over
victorious fields when they were in their prime. And imagine what
it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view
while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the
midst of it all somebody struck up “When we were marching through
Georgia.” Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that
chorus and seen the tears stream down. If I live a hundred years I
sha'n't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them. I
sha'n't ever forget that I saw Phil Sheridan, with martial cloak and
plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own
cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier. I ever
looked upon!
Grand times, my boy, grand times!

Mark Twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that night which he would remember as long as he lived. One of them was by Emory Storrs, another by General Vilas, another by Logan, and the last and greatest by Robert Ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a flame. The Howells letter continues:

I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it; I am
well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again. How pale
those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how
blinding they were in the delivery! Bob Ingersoll's music will sing
through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my
ears. And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a
dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of
seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature
that ever lived. “They fought, that a mother might own her child.”
The words look like any other print, but, Lord bless me! he
borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and
you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you
should have heard the hurricane that followed. That's the only
test! People may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their
napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet.

Clemens's own speech came last. He had been placed at the end to hold the house. He was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for it was two o'clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary speech had made them unresponsive.